Tag Archives: Infrastructure

Roundup: Concern over student measures

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Prime minister Justin Trudeau’s daily presser was shorter than usual – not much news other than the fact that the legislation for student measures would be coming up that afternoon, and oh yeah, the Snowbirds would be doing flyovers across the country as a salute to front-line workers, which immediately got everyone up in arms over how useless it was (but one suspects it’s also about finding a way for them to keep up their flying hours while airshows are grounded pretty much for the rest of the year). During the Q&A, there were yet more questions on trying to goad some kind of federal strong-arming the provinces over re-openings and to have their guidelines include “hard numbers,” whereas Trudeau kept falling back on “foundational elements” and consultations, and of course jurisdictional differences. He also wouldn’t say that he would mandate that meat-packing plants stay open given that there have been outbreaks in several of them (and pre-pandemic, one major plant had been shut down because it couldn’t pass inspection). He also said that there were discussions with the CFL given that they are likely going to have to cancel their season, which again had people grousing about the possibility of a bailout there (though as far as professional sports in this country goes, I would hazard to say that the CFL is one of the least dominated by millionaires).

And then there was the House of Commons. After the “special committee” met in-person in the Chamber for their designated two-and-a-half hours, things shifted to a regular-ish sitting, with the Speaker in robes and in the Big Chair, and the Mace on the table, to discuss the bill on the student measures. This one seems to have been a bit more controversial than other measures, because the Conservatives were demanding that it include measures to ensure that students would still look for jobs (in the middle of a global pandemic, no less) because it’s terrible that they could get paid for staying at home (in the middle of a global pandemic), while the NDP were howling that the measures weren’t as generous as the CERB, forgetting that if students had made more than $5000 last year because they worked enough, they were eligible for the CERB, and this student programme was intended for those who had different circumstances, while also being paired with other enriched benefits. Nevertheless, the government did relent and ensured that a ticky-box would be added to the student application portal to attest that yes, they were looking for a job, while they did increase the benefit levels for students with disabilities or dependants. Crisis averted. The bill heads to the Senate, but not until Friday, for some unknown reason.

I do find the insistence by the Conservatives and the Bloc that these students be forced to work on farms or the like to be problematic because we’ve heard from agricultural producers that this is usually specialized work, and you can’t just send untrained students to do it (which kind of goes to the point about why we should pay the migrant workers with the specialized knowledge more, and ensure that they have pathways to citizenship). As for the pearl-clutching that students might make more on the government wage replacements for the duration of the pandemic instead of taking low-paid jobs that with no guarantee of safety in the course of a pandemic, it does make me wonder if part of that lesson isn’t actually that maybe employers should be offering higher wages rather than demanding that the government enforce their being artificially low. But hey, since when does basic economics enter into the equation?

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Roundup: Framing models as data

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For his daily presser, prime minister Justin Trudeau started off by saying that the government had signed an agreement with Amazon Canada – and not Canada Post – to manage the distribution of personal protective equipment to the provinces and territories when it is received by the federal government, but one imagines that this also involves warehousing and logistics than just simply delivery. He also announced $100 million being diverted to help meet food insecurity needs, through Food Banks Canada, as well as a variety of other breakfast clubs and other food organizations. He also mentioned his teleconference with the other premiers and their devotion to data sharing and projections, and that they were working to verify the latest figures that were being put online. During the Q&A, he confirmed that Canadian Forces – in the form of Rangers – have been dispatched to the Nunavik region of Northern Quebec, and addressed the news that the American president had ordered 3M to stop sending N95 masks to Canada and other Latin American countries (3M’s president pushed back citing humanitarian concerns and retaliation), and Trudeau stated that he has warned the Americans not to block access to needed supplies – particularly as Canada has many supplies and healthcare workers the Americans need, such as the 1000 nurses who live in Windsor but work in Detroit. It does highlight the need for more domestic production of these masks as competition for procurement gets more intense globally.

And then, Ontario released its modelling of some potential COVID-19 morbidity scenarios in the province, and the media went crazy. Despite the fact that this modelling is not data and that they are mere possible scenarios that are used for planning purposes, it was framed as “data” and in the language of how many people “will die,” as though this was mathematical certainty (though a handful said “could,” as though it were any better). And lo, all of the headlines used both this framing and sensationalism, they buried the new restrictions that are being imposed in Ontario as a result. And when some of the doctors that were being interviewed about these projections, and those doctors pushed back that this wasn’t data, self-righteous journalists threw tantrums about how this was information the public had a right to know, and so on.

But here’s the thing – part of this is a transparent attempt by Doug Ford to justify his further crackdowns, which I get. (Thread from Scott Reid here for context). But at the same time, there is no nuance to reporting of these models, they are incorrectly framed, and it’s throwing a lot of big numbers and timeframes out there without sufficient context. It’s not only disaster porn, but I fear that it will not actually have the desired effect of scaring people into compliance with lockdown measures. Instead, I am reminded of the aphorism that a single death is a tragedy, but a thousand deaths is a statistic – and numbers like these (the wild range of 3000 to 15,000) will have the real possibility of becoming a statistic in people’s minds, which may do more to undermine the whole reason why this modelling was released in the first place. And that worries me more than anything else.

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Roundup: Party positions and individual agency

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The weaponization of private members’ business continues unabated in Parliament, as the Conservatives put out an attack yesterday that claims that the Liberals want to “legalize” hard drugs because maverick backbencher Nathaniel Erskine-Smith tabled a private members’ bill that calls on the decriminalization of small personal amounts in order to better treat addiction as a public health issue and to not criminalize people with addictions – something that has worked in some countries. The lie, of course, is both in claiming that this was official government policy, and that it was calling for legalization – because who cares about truth or facts when there is fear to be mongered?

The bigger problem here? What it does to how private members’ business is treated in the House of Commons, and more to the point, there is a very big potential for this to blow up in Scheer’s face because of Cathay Wagantall’s sex-selective abortion bill currently on the Order Paper. And yes, let’s not be obtuse about this – the media feeds this particular weaponization, both in how they made this kind of abortion bill an Issue during the election, and how we both demand that MPs be both independent and yet castigate the leader for “losing control” when any MP shows any glimmer of independence. (And for the record, Scheer has not said anything about Wagantall’s bill, other than to have his spokesperson say that he “discouraged” such bills).

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I know that everyone is going to be cute about these bills, and how if they get tabled the party “must” support the position because everything is so centrally controlled, and so on, but this is part of what poisons the system. Insisting that everyone be marching in lockstep from other parties ensures that the same insistence is made about your own party, and it removes any agency from MPs. They’re MPs, not gods damned battle droids. If we want drones to simply read speeches into the record and vote according the leader’s office, then why do we even bother with MPs? Why bother with parliament at all? The Conservatives’ release is embarrassing, and they should be ashamed of themselves for it (which of course would imply that they’re capable of shame, but I have my doubts about that one too).

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QP: Lessons from radical activists

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While Justin Trudeau was indeed in the building, he was not to show up for Question Period for whatever the reason, so that left Andrew Scheer to lead off by reading that Trudeau, a former teacher, has taught “radical activists” the valuable lesson that they can bring the economy to its knees and that he would do nothing, before he called Trudeau “weak.” Bill Blair said that a commitment to dialogue and reconciliation was not a sign of weakness, and that they trusted the police to do their jobs. Scheer then railed that the government waited too long to decide on Teck Frontier, to which Jonathan Wilkinson reminded him that it was Teck’s decision, and that the CEO demonstrated the need for governments to work together to come up with climate action. Scheer claimed that the current government’s process killed Frontier, to which Wilkinson reminded him it was under the 2012 rules put in when Jason Kenney was in a Cabinet, and that process pushed all of the problems to the back of the process, whereas their new process turns that around. Gérard Deltell railed that the decision dragging out for nine months hurt the fourteen First Nations in the area, to which Wilkinson read quotes from Teck’s CEO. Deltell accused the government of working against those First Nations — as though the price of oil were not too low for the project to be viable — and Wilkinson quoted the letter’s section on global capital markets looking for clean projects. Yves-François Blanchet was up for the Bloc, and he was concerned about a series of crises in the country that the government was not doing anything about, and demanded that Trudeau meet with the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs. Marc Miller stated that they were talking and building trust. Blanchet demanded that they head to BC to resolve the issue, to which Blair reminded him that it was a serious situation which is why they urged people to lift the barricades, and that they trusted law enforcement when those people didn’t. Jagmeet Singh was up for the NDP, and he bemoaned that people need free dental services, for which Patty Hajdu said that the Health committee would be studying the matter and she looked forward to their report. Singh then plugged their Supply Day motion to change the tax changes to divert money toward dental care, to which Hajdu repeated that she would wait for the committee report.

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Roundup: An emergency clip-gathering

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Sympathetic protests continue across the country as Justin Trudeau and several Cabinet ministers convened the Incidence Response Group yesterday, but had little to say as they emerged, other than dialogue remains the best option to resolve the situation as opposed to sending in the police to crack heads. Some new protests included demonstrations that closed Bloor Street in Toronto, and another blockade on the Thousand Islands international bridge (which was short-lived). Carolyn Bennett is still waiting on more meetings, apparently, while the CBC got a leaked recording from Marc Miller’s meeting with the Mohawks in Ontario on Sunday, so there’s that. And amidst this, police associations are grousing that they’re caught in the middle of all of this, criticized for both being too aggressige and not doing enough at the same time.

And with Parliament back again today, the request has been made for an emergency debate on the situation – but I can tell you right now that it’s going to be nothing shy of a five-alarm clown show. If the Speaker decides to grant it, it’ll happen after the close of regular business, so somewhere between 6 and 7 PM, and designated to run until midnight, unless debate collapses sooner. But you can bet that the most that can come of it – and the parties bloody well know it – is that they’ll simply be gathering clips for their social media of their righteous indignation for their side of the debate, whether it’s that the economy is being affected, that police are supposedly not enforcing the rule of law (hint – that’s not what “rule of law” means), or that this government has failed in its goals of reconciliation (as though that could happen in the space of four years). And if it’s outraged clips they want, well, isn’t that what Question Period has devolved into? In other words, I see zero actual utility in the exercise, but then again, I’m cynical (or realistic) like that.

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Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt tries to evaluate this government’s communications around the current situation after they handled the previous two (Flight PS752 and COVID-19) fairly well, and outlines the difference between complex and complicated problems. But being unable to communicate their way out of a wet paper bag is this government’s usual schtick, so that should be no surprise.

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Roundup: Checking Scheer’s privilege

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The solidarity protests with the Coastal GasLink protesters continue across the country, and police continue to hold off on enforcement while dialogue continues – Carolyn Bennett is slated to meet with chiefs in BC, while Marc Miller will be meeting with the Mohawk protesters in Ontario today using the protocols of the covenant chain. And amidst this, Andrew Scheer decided he needed to get involved. It didn’t go well.

Scheer’s tone deafness over the “privilege” remarks likely stem from the belief that the Conservatives have convinced themselves of, that it’s just rich, foreign-funded radicals who are protesting while the First Nations want the projects to proceed because jobs – which some do, but it delegitimizes the legitimate grievances and differences of opinion within Indigenous communities (even if all of the protesters aren’t themselves Indigenous). Add to that, Scheer’s insistence that ministers should be directing the operations of the police is wrong-headed (and dangerous – this is how police states happen), which forgets that even if Bill Blair could get on the phone and direct RCMP to enforce injunctions, the ones in Ontario that have shut down the rail network are squarely within the jurisdiction of the OPP. Oops. There may be some debate over how much authority that governments have to direct enforcement in cases like these, but Scheer (and Scott Moe, who has also been echoing his comments) should know better. That they don’t is a bad sign for the governance of this country.

Meanwhile, Chris Selley decries the ongoing blockades but makes some interesting points about the way in which the male hereditary Wet’suwet’en chiefs displaced the female hereditary chiefs who were in support of the project. Colby Cosh is bemused at how threatening commuters in Central Canada is the kind of leverage that Alberta could only dream of having. Matt Gurney recalls Christie Blatchford’s book on the Caledonia crisis, and how the Ontario Progressive Conservatives apparently didn’t learn anything from what happened then, given their absolute silence over what is happening under their jurisdiction.

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QP: Melting down over court challenges

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While the prime minister was off meeting with big city mayors before heading off to Ethiopia, Andrew Scheer was indeed present, and he led off and he read a bunch of complete lies about the supposed plan to “license” media, to which Steven Guilbeault, who reminded him that the panel recommendations specifically excluded news media and the government would not regulate news media. Scheer insisted that wasn’t good enough and the report somehow would impact free speech, and Guilbeault repeated his answer in English. Scheer tried again, and Guilbeault said that he would be happy to sit down with the opposition when they tabled a bill. Scheer then moved onto UNDRIP, and claimed it was an effective veto on energy projects, to which David Lametti said that they were moving ahead with legislation that would be co-developed with Indigenous people. Scheer tried to use the scare tactics of veto powers, and Lametti suggested that Scheer look at BC’s UNDRIP legislation and see that it is not a veto. Alain Therrien led off for the Bloc, and he railed about the Court Challenges Programme funding a challenge against Quebec’s “secularism” bill, for which Guilbeault said that the government doesn’t have any control over that funding, and that they Bloc should understand the notion of independence. Therrien asked if the government supported the challenge, to which Pablo Rodriguez said that the legislation is being challenged by Quebeckers and that the government was following with interest. Jagmeet Singh was up next for the NDP, and demanded changes to the federal bankruptcy laws to prioritise workers, to which Navdeep Bains said that they had made some commitments in the last budget. Singh then demanded to know how much had been spent on legal fees for the challenge around the First Nations compensation, to which David Lametti said that reports of legal fees are calculated according to a set formula.

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QP: Fictional legislation and crass quips

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Wednesday, caucus day, and MPs were riled up in the aftermath. Andrew Scheer led off, and he recited some concern about the state of the Trans Mountain pipeline, to which Justin Trudeau expressed his satisfaction with the Federal Court of Appeal and that the previous government couldn’t get it done without boosterism. Scheer then tried to hand-wave about fictional “emergency legislation” around court challenges and worried about the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a “new threshold” to prevent development, to which Trudeau called out the whole question as a reflection of how the Conservatives don’t understand how things work. Scheer tried again, and Trudeau called out the misinformation. Scheer switched to French to worry about the supposed “plan” to license media, to which Trudeau picked up a script to read that they would not impose licensing on news. Scheer changed to English and lied about what was in the report, as well as the media “bailout” fund, and Trudeau slowly enunciated that they would not impose licenses on news organisations or regulate news content. Yves-François Blanchet was up next for the Bloc, and he rambled about they English School Board of Montreal getting money to challenge the “secularism” bill, to which Trudeau started that the Court Challenges Programme awards aid to groups in an arm’s length way from government. Blanchet tried to make this an issue of provincial jurisdiction, to which Trudeau repeated that programme was independent of government. Jagmeet Singh was then up for the NDP, and complained about the backlogs for women regaining First Nations status after the law changed to broaden the criteria. Trudeau started that they have spent record amounts to Indigenous communities, and it takes longer because the delivery needs to be done in partnership with those communities. Singh then moved onto the Coast Gas Link pipeline dispute, demanding that the prime minister meet with the hereditary chiefs, to which Trudeau stated that the issue was entirely under provincial jurisdiction, which they respect.

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QP: Putting the heat on Blair

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While Justin Trudeau fled the capital to go sell auto workers the merits of the New NAFTA over in Brampton, Andrew Scheer was elsewhere. Candice Bergen led off with the story of the murder of a sex worker of a person on parole, and demanded a denunciation of the Board’s actions. Bill Blair reminded her that an investigation has been launched into the matter. Bergen asked about MasterCard getting $50 million from the government, to which Mélanie Joly said that the government was investing into a cyber-security centre. Bergen said that MasterCard can afford to pay for their own cyber-security, and bashed the investment again, and Joly responded about the importance of job creation. Luc Berthold was up next to ask about the Auditor General’s budget, to which Jean-Yves Duclos effused about the Middle Class before citing that they would work with the Auditor General. Berthold asked again in French, and Duclos responded with the record on growth and job creation. Yves-François Blanchet was up next to worry about Teck Frontier Mine destroying the Paris Agreement, and Jonathan Wilkinson responded that they were still making their determination on the environmental assessment. Blanchet also worried that said mine would require new pipelines and wondered if they were afraid of saying no to Jason Kenney, to which Wilkinson repeated that they were still considering it. Jagmeet Singh was up for the NDP, to once again demand limiting the tax break in order to fund dental care, and Bill Morneau reminded Singh that their tax cuts have benefited 20 million Canadians. Singh asked again in French, and got much the same response. 

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Roundup: No metric to measure success

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The inevitable has happened with this government’s too-clever-by-half branding of their associate finance minister, and she has essentially been caught out by the easiest trap imaginable. The Conservatives submitted an Order Paper question asking for a definition of “middle class” by which the government could measure the success of its efforts at ensuring their prosperity, and lo, they were told that there is no measure that the government uses. Which is kind of embarrassing for a government that prides itself on data and metrics – that’s one of the reasons why they actually bit the bullet and decided on the Market-Basket Measure of poverty as their official definition, because that allowed them to track the success of their programmes in alleviating it (and yes, programmes like the Canada Child Benefit have had a measurable impact using these kinds of data). But what they can do for poverty, they can’t do for the Middle Class™.

Of course, we all know that it’s because “middle class” isn’t an economic definition to this government, but a feel-good branding exercise. It’s the Middle Class™ And Those Working Hard To Join It, because we all know that everyone thinks they’re middle class (whether or not they have ponies), and most especially people on the wealthier end of the scale in this country. It’s all about a feeling, or a hand-wavey metric about having kids in hockey (an upper-class pursuit in this country). And this lack of a definition is exactly why this minister is the Minister of Middle Class™ Prosperity®, because it means nothing. It’s a trademarked slogan, transparently winking to Canadians about how this is how they plan to address the discontent underlying the populist movements taking place across the government – hoping that if they can reassure these voters that they’re being care of and not left behind, that they’re being heard, that somehow, it’ll keep the populist forces at bay. I’m not sure that it will work, but it’s blatantly happening, so we should all be aware that this is part of their plan.

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